Though it stars Colin Farrell, reprising his part from Matt Reeves’ 2022 film The Batman, and is set just after the catastrophic events in Gotham that the Riddler masterminded at the end of the third act, you’re better off thinking of the Penguin as a kind of YA Sopranos than an addition to the Batverse. The Caped Crusader doesn’t appear and all the villainy on show – including that of the Penguin, now known as Oz Cobb instead of Oswald Cobblepot in a further move away from cartoonishness – is of a very human kind.
Carmine, his boss and head of the Falcone crime family, was killed at the end of The Batman. There is now a power vacuum in the city and the series follows the Penguin’s attempts to rise from his position as a mid-level gangster, trusted to run a nightclub and a portion of the gangsters’ drug business but never fully accepted. It is his yearning for respect that drives him on through the deadly game of snakes and ladders towards his goal of dominating Gotham and makes The Penguin into much more than just another money-grubbing spin-off of a famous franchise.
Cobb manages the first step – killing Carmine’s son and useless heir apparent, Alberto – with relative ease, after an exchange between them whose emotional brutality is almost as great as Alberto’s ensuing death. This lets viewers know from the off that we are in the presence of a show markedly better than it needed to be and likely to satisfy even the highest expectations of the fandom.
Cristin Milioti plays Alberto’s much more capable sister Sofia, recently released from a 10-year stint in Arkham asylum for a string of murders she supposedly committed. A tentative bond forms between them – Cobb used to be her driver when they were younger, and she too knows what it is to be passed over in favour of lesser men – but it becomes strained and then shattered as her suspicions grow about Cobb’s involvement with her brother’s death.
Cobb recruits a teenage boy, Victor (Rhenzy Feliz) – a gentle soul who lost his home and his family in the city flood and is trying to survive alone – as his driver and assistant. He takes the boy under his wing (no pun intended; it’s not that kind of show) and their relationship is punctuated by moments of tenderness in which we can see what Cobb might have become if … well, if either nature or nurture had been different. The different contributions these forces make is one of the questions The Penguin likes to play with. To which end, Cobb’s mentally unstable mother, Francis (Deirdre O’Connell), is introduced and comes to be an increasingly important part of the puzzle of Cobb’s origin story.
The Penguin lets nothing get in the way of its story, though. The plotting is fast and neat, with Cobb only ever a hair’s breadth away from triumph or disaster and the audience left breathless watching which way the latest twist will take him. Farrell – really a revelation here, despite being buried beneath layers of prosthetics – keeps the desperation of an underestimated, under-loved being running always just beneath the surface of the ruthless killer. Glimpses of the man he might have been (with Sofia, with his sort-of girlfriend and with Victor) are just frequent enough for us to mourn the loss.
The Penguin is a slick and powerful beast, with enough action and heart to capture existing fans and create many more. And Farrell himself should soon be swimming in a sea of awards.
• The Penguin aired on Sky Atlantic and is on Now.
